I’m just sitting here in our cute little apartment style Air BNB lodging in Provincetown MA, and thinking about what it means to enjoy someone.
Last week I tried to write a post about what was going on. Essentially how I’ve felt frozen with writing or reading as we are in the administration phase of transitioning out of our home and into a new one. I’ve been obsessively consumed and focused on this task. It has shown me I really am this way about everything, not just love 😉
I’ll re-look at our new home online on Zillow over and over, and wonder a thousand things. As a highly sensitive person I know now that this is natural that this will be very intense for me. This home on Berkshire rd was a beginning and an end. The end of a certain level of poverty and not having my own. And the beginning of an adventure into myself.
To make it work as I went through loss we moved my dear friends Jen and Dain into the mix, and then they brought Joey into the world while living there. They became family. They have since moved onto their own home but their spirit and our times shared linger.
However so do the ghosts of exes past and I also had to get my ex name cleared of owning this home. And Courtney and I want to begin fresh! Once again in this lifetime I get to take threshold photos, though I very much doubt either of us will be carrying the other. We now live in the realm of nearing 40. Aches and pains and bad backs and a few extra inches to love and snuggle.
What will it feel like that first night sleeping there? What will it be like the move? I still see things through eyes of youthful naïveté and sometimes expect it to be more fun in my mind, and then when I get there realize moving actually is very stressful. Though I should like to think that’s a matter of perspective. But sometimes it’s probably a matter of emotion and change and in the spirit of The Velveteen Rabbit I’ve become more real as of late.
Real meaning I am connected to my emotions and feelings as I go now, versus being naturally and unintentionally capable of compartmentalizing to a frightening degree. I feel my feelings and boy are they huge. I am beginning to be able to love that about me, versus shaming it.
So here I am with my wife this time on the brink of another grand adventure. On this trip I’m finally able to have some space with my feelings to see what all is going on in here… and what I am finding is becoming emotional every few minutes with a deep and intense gratitude. She is such a happy person. The antidote to my serious heavy sides.
I teared up several times driving here yesterday when she shares with me so unabashedly her affection for me. She tells me she never knew she could love someone so much. How I look, how I smell, my sense of humor. The woman delights in me and I’ve never been the subject of such deep adoration.
This kind of love is like a magic potion. It is changing me daily, and now I’m trying to learn it and be that way with my kids. I wonder sometimes if this is not the natural order of things and if I’m expecting too much from myself. But due to being a young mother who was married into the wrong one per her sexuality and actually a few other things that that blinded her to, I am oft to behave in such a way that my kids could feel a burden. This breaks my heart.
So can I at this late stage of the game when they are 17, 15, and 15 show them how I delight in each of them? Rather than being a task oriented General that commands her ship well, but has lost some of the essence of what is truly important to a child. Or rather never had that perhaps. But has now learned it through watching others and this delicious love.
There is nothing to escape anymore in this life I have made and I try to make my body and my mind catch up to that realization, but they are slower to adjust, and that takes its toll sometimes.
Anyway I just wanted to share about this love. That we just enjoy each other immensely whether we are completing tasks together or on a getaway. We work seamlessly and are always gentle with the other’s heart. Gentle is not something anyone would have ever described me as I don’t think prior to this.
I don’t know that my kids would describe me as gentle either. I am striving towards that in this half of my life, and to be a fully engaged parent interested always in what they have going on. And I am, but how to show them more, when mostly I live in my head.
In the morning when the lake of my mind is still I can see all the way to the bottom of the depths of my affection for them, but as the day goes on and the water is alive with busy, they hear did you do this, did you do that?! I’m hoping to invite them to the still lake of my morning mind to see how much I would do for them, and how they have changed all of my life for the better. How much time I spend thinking about them and their happiness and dreams.
My children and this love have saved me from a life of persistent suffering of the mind and spirit. It still lingers often, but attending to them pulls me back out into presence and now I am still building that secure foundation.
Thank you dear witnesses for seeing my journey, you heal me as well, by bestowing your most precious resource …. time.
Tick tock tick tock….. what do you want with your one precious go round in this lifetime? It goes faster, much faster, than you realize.